So, can they read my mail after it's been opened (or sat around for 180 days) because it's electronic? If I left my unread mail lying around my house, they'd still need a warrant to get it.

Is it because it's hosted on some company's servers in the cloud? If I rent a box from the UPS store, they'd have to get a warrant.

This law makes absolutely no sense.

Nuh-uh, your freedoms make absolutely no sense. You are secure in your papers and effects, don't see anything about clouds in the constituition anywhere. As any Justice will tell you, all rights not specifically reserved for the people in 1790's lingo are the domain of government.

In more interesting news, the IRS apparently has a Criminal Investigation Unit with Special Agents, and CBS hasn't spun off a procedural drama about it yet.

So, can they read my mail after it's been opened (or sat around for 180 days) because it's electronic? If I left my unread mail lying around my house, they'd still need a warrant to get it.

Is it because it's hosted on some company's servers in the cloud? If I rent a box from the UPS store, they'd have to get a warrant.

This law makes absolutely no sense.

It makes perfect sense under the processes used to read email at the time it was drafted; in the 80s and most of the 90s (and still to this day, using POP3), the ISP mail server is only a temporary destination, and you bring the mail as a final step to a machine in your control; anything left on an ISP server for 6 months without being read (ie fetched from the server) is deemed "abandoned". To get the mail off *your* machine requires a warrant.

as far as he knows, the IRS has never obtained e-mails without a warrant.

Nobody has told me about agents rifling through people's emails without a warrant and I don't want to know. AND we're not going to be looking either.

Quote:

“In the criminal context we seek a search warrant in advance of going to an ISP for e-mail content,” Miller added. “On the civil side we don't have a policy that has us going to get [e-mails] anyway. We’re going clarify that in our procedures. In short, we are following Warshak.”

We don't have a policy to look at people's emails in criminal cases because we know this won't end well and the evidence will be thrown out. On the civil side we don't have a policy to look at people's emails without a warrant. OTOH, we have no policies to forbid it and no procedures to enforce this nonexistent policy. Therefore, our agents have everything to gain and nothing to lose by doing so.

It makes perfect sense under the processes used to read email at the time it was drafted; in the 80s and most of the 90s (and still to this day, using POP3), the ISP mail server is only a temporary destination, and you bring the mail as a final step to a machine in your control; anything left on an ISP server for 6 months without being read (ie fetched from the server) is deemed "abandoned". To get the mail off *your* machine requires a warrant.

More people need to pay attention to this because this is what's really going on here. ECPA was written in the era of older electronic communication systems and was written more for voicemail than email in the first place. ECPA may have been a bad law when it was written (clearly it didn't transform well into the future!), but it was not an abysmal one. Now, however, the way we communicate electronically has changed, and their abandonment clause doesn't accurately reflect abandoned communications.

The right way to fix this is to amend ECPA and remove the abandonment clause altogether. That may make the job of law enforcement harder, but there's not really a good general way to define "abandonment", given how many ways we communicate electronically online. Any law that tries to pin it down now could be wrong again in another 30 years, and will miss a lot of things anyway.

Although Miller stated that the IRS Criminal Investigation unit obtains warrants for all emails, he did not discuss other forms of electronic communication such as text messages, instant messages, and direct messages on social media. Under the Fourth Amendment, a warrant should be required for those private communications as well.

Okay fine, you're the ACLU. But the "gold" the IRS really wants (evidence of unpaid taxes that are due) is in people's email, for example stock transactions or foreign account notices. It's probably not going to be found in text messages or other electronic messages.

geo_2 said it pretty well. Miller may have been ignorant of his agents invading other peoples mailboxes, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. If you really think they aren't doing that, I may have a bridge in Brooklyn that I can sell you real cheap!

Miller’s testimony comes less than a week after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) handbook dating back to 2009 asserting that Americans “do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in [e-mail] communications.” Miller also agreed to update IRS policy documents within the next 30 days to explicitly reflect this.

I think the main headline juxtaposed with the subhedline is tragic/ funny. It's the second time this week that a headline could be read two ways, one that reads nearly the opposite.

Read. The sentences again... the first can be translated to the shorter "IRS has never read your emails." The second can be interpreted to say "And that policy changing in 30 days", ie., in 30 days we are going to start reading them.

I know that's not what the author means, but it's funny how badly grammatical clarity is evaporting in media (the other article wasn't on Ars, it was AP on the Virginian Pilot) as we've made it easier to report. Sorry for the complete tangent.

I'm not sure what the big deal is. The IRS is only concerned with tax collection, and criminal efforts to evade taxes. Your email isn't going to have any real information because any such collections efforts have to be use and would involve third parties who are all too happy to records over the IRS.

Unless you're dealing in raw BTC (and not using Dwolla), they would have no need.

Of course, I don't understand why IRS agents get to carry guns either.

Steven Miller, told a Senate committee that as far as he knows, the IRS has never obtained e-mails without a warrant.

And as far as I know, the PotUS has never used a drone strike on U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. Whether it has been done is not the issue; the fact that some people in the government think that it is legal is.

Although Miller stated that the IRS Criminal Investigation unit obtains warrants for all emails, he did not discuss other forms of electronic communication such as text messages, instant messages, and direct messages on social media. Under the Fourth Amendment, a warrant should be required for those private communications as well.

Why does the "FORM" of private communication matter ? The Laws should reflect ALL types of private communication irregardless of how it occurs. Otherwise - as usual with various other technologies (personal tape decks and VCRs in the 80s - or iPods and DVRs and Torrents today) - we end up having to revisit this shit every 5-10 years because some new damned form of "communication" (or interst technology here) arises that is not specifically targeted by some Law that lacked foresight enough to be both vague and too narrow at the same time.

Although Miller stated that the IRS Criminal Investigation unit obtains warrants for all emails, he did not discuss other forms of electronic communication such as text messages, instant messages, and direct messages on social media. Under the Fourth Amendment, a warrant should be required for those private communications as well.

Okay fine, you're the ACLU. But the "gold" the IRS really wants (evidence of unpaid taxes that are due) is in people's email, for example stock transactions or foreign account notices. It's probably not going to be found in text messages or other electronic messages.

The IRS uses its Big Stick for all kinds of law enforcement. Remember that Al Capone was brought down for tax evasion, not for all the other rotten stuff he did.

When the IRS starts digging, they want to be able to read/discover everything you've done. An audit that appears to expose deliberate tax fraud is likely to result in warrants and "requests" that will cover just about every means of communication and record-keeping you can imagine.

Hypothetical: IRS investigates a drug trafficker for failure to buy tax stamps for his product. Dealer uses text to set up and confirm buys/sales. IRS now has a better wedge to pry into other areas.

Not so hypothetical: High school sporting official posts status updates (on social media) on games he's worked, and also puts game reports and questions about calls/situations on a private (i.e., accessible only with approved/paid login) discussion board. Initial IRS audit reveals (unreported) income of potentially a couple thousand dollars. Deeper digging reveals the official has worked four sports, to the tune of $12,000 or so a year for several years. Discovers officials association hasn't been reporting income (as an association) or payouts (to 1099-eligible officials). Uses subpoena to get records showing pattern of assignor contacting officials via text and email. Then uses THOSE records to support audits of every single official in that association.

Total unreported income, with 300 or so officials: something on the order of $250,000. All discovered because one guy posted his schedule of games on a popular social media site.

Should they have been caught, and assessed back taxes and fines (and threatened with jail terms of up to 10 years)? Yeah, probably.

But don't kid yourself into thinking that the IRS is only concerned with folks buying foreign stock and moving millions to offshore tax havens.

Theoretical question. If, every time I get an email on my cloud mail server (yahoo, gmail, etc>) I forward it to myself and delete the original. Then every 170ish days (or whenever I re-read an email), I re-forward them and delete. Would they then always need a warrant, even for mail I've kept for 5 years?